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Example: I only know of the company Cloudmade because they provide (a now outdated, but fine at the time) download portal of ready-to-use shapefiles derived from OSM data. Though this service might have helped its competitors, they probably earned much more in terms of visibility, which might spawn e.g. development contracts for custom-made solutions.
This ...
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There's a big difference between “available to the public” and “belonging to the public”. By accessing a privately-owned website, you are accepting its terms and conditions. These conditions typically preclude scraping and aggregation. Here's an example from Amazon's (Canada) Licence and Access terms:
Subject to your compliance with these Conditions
of Use ...
7
The answers to the question on open data stories might also be useful to you. I've summarized some of those and added some more (courtesy of Anastasios Ventouris, pattern-recognition, Charles Worthington, Alisha Green, Taal, tobip, fgregg, Diabolus, Rebecca Williams)
The Open Data 500 is a collection of 500 companies that have built a business model on ...
7
Each of the datasets on Data.gov describes the license used (see the upper left items on the dataset page). The intent for data provided by the U.S. Government (whether it is on Data.gov or not) is to have an open license, as defined by Project Open Data. The license field in the Data.gov metadata schema is defined as well.
In most cases, the license is "...
6
I'm not sure about specific examples in the USA, but the OpenStreetMap had some outstanding success in various countries. There are bound to be disaster stories in the US as well.
A famous example is the Haiti earthquake. It also has nice visuals.
Less known is perhaps the community mapping in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania:
http://www.opendta.org/Pages/...
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Learning:
This is huge and can be applied to anything.
Imagine trying to learn how to play poker. You can only play one hand every hour. How long will it take you to learn how to play poker?
"Not too out of date for my use case"
If the company is smart and whose goal is to make a profit, they will change their "use case" or even completely revamp the ...
6
Apparently, here:
Source: http://www.usgs.gov/blogs/features/files/2015/01/free-and-open-data-policy-graph-no-footnote.jpg
Here is the original post, noting cost savings from Landsat. http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/?p=9654
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Quality of the file format doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter if a specific application is needed for working with the file format (or if there exists such an application at all).
It only matters if the file format is proprietary or open/free/libre.
With "excel", Tim Berners-Lee probably refered to the Excel Binary File Format, which is one of ...
6
Open Sports Data has been around for awhile, as sports have some extremely involved fans.
Here is some data, references, and resources:
General Sports
Sports Data Query Language (SDQL)
SportsDataBase (SDQL) Google Group
Sports Data Visualization using the Sports Data Query Language
Download KillerSports.com's Data
API
More Databases
Baseball
Lahman ...
5
One reason to open your data is that the people who may be using the data may not be your competitors; by putting it out there for other people to use, there may be people who are able to find interesting uses for your data that you might not have considered.
In the case of science data, the ultimate goal should not be to make a profit, but to make a ...
5
On the licensing questions, you'd want to retain an IP attorney. Everyone above is correct to state that works by the US government are explicitly excluded under US Copyright Act protection, but there are several exceptions depending on how the data was collected, sourced, or modified by non-US government actors. For example, another issue Malamud has taken ...
4
Alright, some links!
This was started years ago, but didn't seem to take off: http://opendatastories.org/
Before the Beyond Transparency book, CfA did Engagement Stories: http://commons.codeforamerica.org/engagement-commons (The Commons hasn't been getting a ton of love recently though)
OKF has a (more recent) living doc exploring how open data improved ...
4
For stories about companies and groups successfully using open data in the United States, there are two sources:
Highlights on Data.gov -- these are companies, civil society groups, non-profits, and citizens using open government data
The Open Data 500 -- this is a collection of 500 companies that have built a business model on open data (both government ...
4
In Oakland we used a mix of open data and proprietary to plan out and implement a Community Land Trust- the data (foreclosures- public data sold by private firms, not open) helped to make the case for federal funding, and allowed us to target neighborhoods of high need (assessors data-open) as well as to purchase foreclosed homes while avoiding the most ...
4
Restricting to US businesses, this research is the most complete
http://www.opendata500.com/
It lists a lot of companies with the kind of data they use.
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Just off the top of my head, not counting the various companies doing scientific research:
USGS maps : used by resource exploration (eg, oil) companies, travel expeditions (canoe / hiking trips)
National Weather Service data & forecasts : used by airlines, farmers, power companies, insurance companies, most companies that have people working outdoors
...
4
This one obviously. I also use http://reddit.com/r/opendata, and more recently the Open Knowledge Foundation's forums (http://discuss.okfn.org/) but that's for a project specific to them so I can't vouch for it as being good for general discussions or questions.
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Great questions- and ones that we try to answer as clearly as possible. We've got a slew of links on the submission page including FAQs- but how would you want the information presented so that it's easiest to access?
Once data is submitted to the DDL via the webpage(yes we are looking at easier submission methods) the data goes through a clearance process ...
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Check out data.world - a social network for data people, that are building the world’s most collaborative, abundant, and meaningful data resource.
Below are some example sports-related datasets, and you can search the platform by keyword to find other related data. If you don't see what you're looking for, you can create a dataset page and add a '...
4
You can use QGIS to save the data from this service to all supported vector file formats.
I have tried adding the url https://dservices1.arcgis.com/0MSEUqKaxRlEPj5g/arcgis/services/Active_Volcanoes_WFS/WFSServer to the list of WFS services in QGIS 3.6.2 and it shows the SDE_GLB_VOLC without a problem. You can right click on the layer name (SDE_GLB_VOLC) in ...
3
The World Bank: Data
Open Government (US)
Open Data Communities (UK)
San Francisco Data
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You already listed a bunch. There's also
Philadelphia's Open Data Pipeline
Whitehouse Scorecard
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You should check the new project of Open Knowledge Foundation about community stories.
http://okfncommunity.tumblr.com
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Check out www.dataforgood.io, a platform for sharing data-driven projects for social good. It's maybe the first crowdsourced directory of such projects. Anyone can post.
There are not only open data projects, but you can find them by choosing the open data category.
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So if you compare Open Data to Open Source, than Open* seems to be a good strategy to survive in a small market segment. Some typical advantages can be
in case of collaborative work - open is much easier in many dimensions
in case of collecting additional data from your customers - the enhance of your data quality. Thats maybe valuable to you?
in case of ...
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You could also take a look at data.gov.uk case studies which has 69 case studies of open data use across the UK, it may help extrapolate some scenarios.
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There's Code For America's e-book Beyond Transparency
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Three examples:
There is a startup that generates stock market signals from real-time social network data
There is a logistics consultant who visualizes lots of inventory data in real time (link leads to a German promo video).
Here is someone who predicts visitors to South Tyrolean using amazon sales rankings of travel literature (ok, maybe this project may ...
3
National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, mailing list NICAR is an oldie and a goodie. http://www.ire.org/resource-center/listservs/archives/
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Well, here's one: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/the-most-ignored-parking-sign-in-melbourne-20140512-zraek.html
Here's the background: http://www.theage.com.au/data-point/blogs/the-crunch--data-point/melbourne-parking--get-the-data-20140513-386wv.html
Summary: data journalists from The Age found data on the City of Melbourne's data portal, wrote a story ...
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